Colorado history

Thursday, October 29, 2026

A city hall that finally stops arguing with itself, a senator who digs under the Continental Divide, and a Denver girl who ends up chasing people for a living on television.

Denver finishes the City and County Building and gives Civic Center its western wall

1932 · Civic Center, Denver

After twenty-six years of arguments, bond issues, and thirty-nine architects, the neoclassical seat of city government is completed facing the Capitol.

Voters had signed off on the site back in 1923. Construction started in 1929, which turned out to be useful timing: the project put nearly 400 people to work while the Depression was still figuring out how bad it planned to be.

The building was kept deliberately low so the Capitol would not lose its view of the mountains. A bronze eagle sits on the clock tower (later gilded), the Christmas lights started a couple of years later and never really stopped, and the whole thing still anchors the Civic Center Historic District. Dedicated in August, listed as completed on the 29th. Either way, the city finally had a proper front porch.

The old city hall eventually came down. This one is still here, columns and all.

Sources: Timeline of Denver · Colorado Encyclopedia · City and County of Denver

Alva Blanchard Adams is born in Del Norte, the first Colorado-born U.S. senator

1875 · Del Norte, Rio Grande County

Son of a future three-term governor, he grows up to serve in the Senate, chair public-lands committees, and lend his name to the tunnel under Rocky Mountain National Park.

Born in the Colorado Territory town of Del Norte, Adams was the son of Alva Adams, who would later serve three non-consecutive terms as governor. The younger Adams went east for school (Phillips Andover, Yale, Columbia Law) then came home to practice in Pueblo.

Appointed to the Senate in 1923 after a death, then elected in his own right in 1932 and reelected in 1938, he served until he died in office in 1941. He was the first U.S. senator from Colorado who had actually been born in the state. The 13-mile Alva B. Adams Tunnel under the Continental Divide, the main artery of the Colorado-Big Thompson Project, is named for him.

A Colorado kid who went away, came back, and then helped move a river under a mountain.

Sources: Biographical Directory of the U.S. Congress · Wikipedia

Beth Chapman is born in Denver and eventually becomes half of Dog the Bounty Hunter

1967 · Denver

Alice Elizabeth Smith arrives in Denver. Years later she is the licensed bail agent, television co-star, and the person who keeps the Chapman family operation from flying completely apart.

Born Alice Elizabeth Smith in Denver, she met Duane “Dog” Chapman after an arrest (shoplifting, unlicensed gun, unpaid tickets—her father hired him). She later became a licensed bail agent herself, reportedly the youngest in Colorado at the time, and the two built a life that included a long-running A&E reality series.

The shows turned their work, their blended family, and their particular brand of chaos into appointment television. She died of cancer in 2019 at 51. On her birthday, Denver can claim the woman who made bounty hunting look like a family business with a camera crew.

Not every Colorado kid ends up on the cover of a reality show. This one did.

Sources: Wikipedia